


your love has always been (a fever dream)

by hoosierbitch



Category: White Collar
Genre: Angst, Community: gulf_aid_now, Dreams, Fever, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-18
Updated: 2010-09-18
Packaged: 2017-10-12 13:52:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/125556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoosierbitch/pseuds/hoosierbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Vital Signs hurt/comfort, with Neal recovering at the Burke's house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your love has always been (a fever dream)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [usakeh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/usakeh/gifts).



> This is for the lovely [](http://usakeh.livejournal.com/profile)[**usakeh**](http://usakeh.livejournal.com/), who made a very generous donation to[](http://community.livejournal.com/gulf_aid_now/profile)[ **gulf_aid_now**](http://community.livejournal.com/gulf_aid_now/)! She requested post-Vital Signs hurt/comfort, with sick!Neal recovering at the Burkes' house. I hope you like it, darling! 

He stared at the back of his right hand.

His thumb hurt. The joint and tendons and tender muscles. He’d had to dislocate it to get out of the cuffs. But it was a familiar ache; he acknowledged it and let it go. He tried staring out of the window but couldn’t keep up with the passing scenery so turned back to his hand.

There was a freckle. On the webbing between his thumb and pointer finger, a freckle that he’d never noticed before. There were five tiny creases on the back of both of the knuckles of his middle finger. No…six. And only four on his pinky.

“What do you know,” he asked Peter, who was muttering about breaking the law and leashes and video tapes and blah blah blah, “as well as you know the back of your hand?”

He could, and did, make the tendons dance underneath his skin. Wiggling his fingers. He stopped when they started to feel like they were going to float away.

“Your case file.”

“Huh.” He frowned. “I’ve got a freckle,” he shared, because he wanted Peter to know the back of his hand, too. “And I can’t feel my knees. Or - I think I can’t. Now I’m not sure. Peter – what do knees feel like?”

He vomited before Peter could answer. Barely managed to lean forward in time so that most of it landed in the footwell.

“Jesus Christ, Caffrey!”

“That’s my name,” he moaned, even though they both knew that, really, it wasn’t. “Don’t – don’t wear it – ” he was having a hard time talking. A hard time moving his tongue in his mouth, he had a freckle and his thumb ached every time he squeezed his knees to try and keep himself together, tried to keep from vomiting again. Peter pulled the car over and then pulled Neal out of it and onto the sidewalk before guiding his head down between his legs.

“I can feel my knees again,” Neal realized, right before he puked for the second time.

Distantly he could hear Peter swearing, distantly he could smell and taste and see his own vomit, distantly he felt his body, separate and foreign. The shame was not distant. Was not foreign. The shame was immediate and visceral and it _hurt_.

Peter crouched down next to him on the sidewalk and awkwardly patted his shoulder. Neal stared at Peter’s hand moving, at his shirt wrinkling under Peter’s hand, and didn’t feel a thing.

*

They pulled up in front of the house and Peter half-carried Neal inside, sat him down on the couch, explained everything to Elizabeth, and all Neal could think _(through the pounding of blood in his head)_ was how helpless he was without Peter.

He could have _(should have)_ died. Could have been killed or beaten or assaulted, could have been _disappeared_ , a threat and an inconvenience.

If he’d been discovered even two seconds earlier, if the fax hadn’t gone through, if he hadn’t remembered the number – he counted the _ifs_ like sheep jumping over a fence as Peter eased him onto the couch.

He had been afraid.

No – he had been terrified.

He’d never been that completely helpless on a job before. Tied down, his cover blown, physically powerless, watching the syringe plunge into his arm, releasing an unknown poison into his veins.

He’d dislocated his thumb, slipped out of the cuff, and picked the rest with the kit he kept sewn into the waistband of his pants. It had taken him twenty-two minutes _(the door ajar, the clock ticking second by second by second)_. And every second the drug slid further into his body, and his mind drifted further away, and by the time he was free he’d forgotten why he had to run.

“You going to charge me with breaking and entering?” he asked, as Peter blurred and multiplied before his heavy eyes. “What – which prison am I going to go to this time?” Peter blurred and moved and shifted and eventually sat down next to him on the couch.

“Tell June I’m sorry,” he remembered to say before the darkness that had been dancing in the corner of his vision for hours closed in around him. “So sorry.”

*

He dreamed June’s granddaughter dying.

Dreamed that she was helpless on a hospital bed with poison in her veins. In the dream he offered to show her how to dislocate her thumb, offered to take her away with him. She said _yes_ and he tried to pick the locks. He couldn’t feel his fingers and failed, over and over, his heartbeat like the hand of a clock deafening him as he worked.

“Peter will come for us,” he told her when she started to cry. Little girl lost, skin gone yellow and cracked and old. He sat down to wait.

In the dream, Peter didn’t come. And June’s granddaughter died.

*

The inside of his elbow blossomed into a deep purple bruise over the course of the next hour. “That looks bad,” El said sympathetically, gently rubbing a finger over it, checking to see if he needed a Band-Aid.

“Could be worse,” he said, and he’d been trying to be reassuring but El just frowned unhappily at him. “The drugs were kind of fun for a bit. Made me go all fuzzy. I think I may have started singing, at some point, before I went all numb and – and…” he couldn’t think of the word he wanted. _Already said fuzzy_. Which wasn’t quite the right word, either, he’d felt – he’d felt…helpless.

The nurse had pushed the needle so deep into his arm that he’d been half-convinced it would come out the other side. Pushed it in and then injected something into his flesh that had burned, he’d tracked the spread of fire in his veins as clearly as he could manage.

“I’m glad that it wasn’t worse,” El said, and he startled when she talked because somehow he’d forgotten that she was there. That scared him. He looked around the room but they were alone, no one else there, no one else he’d seen and inexplicably forgotten.

He was starting to hurt again. Her fingers loosely wrapped around his forearm felt like iron brands.

“Nurse Ratched gave me a present,” he said, his mouth working even after he finished talking because that movie had terrified him when he’d first seen it and he’d been so close to living it. He still felt trapped in a nightmare. He twisted on the couch and El let him go

She stayed there while he shook, the burning in his veins fading and flaring up without warning. She didn’t touch him again, but she didn’t leave, and somehow her mere presence helped keep him sane.

*

“What do you know,” he asked Elizabeth when the last of the fog faded and left him feeling bone-dry and beaten, “as well as you know the back of your hand?” Peter chuckled from the chair across from them.

El was sitting next to him on the couch, perched on the edge because with Neal lying on it there wasn’t a lot of room ( _but whenever she left the shakes got worse and so she stayed_ ). “Well,” she said slowly. “I – I don’t know. Peter, I suppose.” She smiled down at Neal. “I know the back of Peter’s hand like my own,” she laughed. “Maybe better.”

“Yeah,” Peter agreed, brushing one of his hands over the other. “Probably true.”

They smiled at each other and Neal, filled with jealousy and sickness, smiled and turned his face into the couch cushions.

*

He dreamed Kate dying.

Dreamed Nurse Ratched pumping Kate’s veins full of drugs, dreamed her screaming for help, dreamed himself helpless to help her over and over again.

“Peter will come for us,” he tried to explain.

“He’s gone,” she whispered before she, too, left him. “You destroyed him.”

“I miss you,” he confessed to the blank spaces at the end of her arms.

He was forgetting her. Forgetting the shape of her earlobes and favorite fruits, forgetting the hands that had touched him so gently for so long, he remembered her distorted by the bullet-proof glass of the visiting room.

Kate died and Peter didn’t show up and Neal sat and listened to the clock, counting down the details of his failures.

*

The next time he woke up, Peter was there. He washed Neal’s forehead with a wet cloth and made him drink water and held him down when he tried to get to his cell phone to call a taxi.

“You’re staying here until you stop looking like you’ll piddle on the floor when I yell at you.”

“You’re going to yell at me?”

“Very, very loudly,” Peter promised.

Neal nodded and then had to wait for the nausea to pass. “You’re a good man,” he said, when the room stopped spinning. He picked at a loose thread on the knit blanket that was covering him. Peter swatted his hand away after a minute.

“That blanket’s an heirloom, Neal. El’s mom made it. Show some respect.”

Neal gathered his thoughts and continued. “You _were_ a good man.” Peter looked confused. “You broke the law for me. You’re a good man, and I – I don’t know what I should be more scared of. How you’re changing me, or – how I’m changing you.” Peter didn’t answer right away and he realized he had more to say. “If you hadn’t shown up,” _(Peter will save us, the first time in he could remember that he’d relied on someone else so heavily, trusted anyone that much)_ “I would have – ”

“But I was there,” Peter interrupted, like the sheer coincidence of his arrival was an answer. “I made my own choices, Neal.” And broke his own laws.

Peter was resting his arm on the arm of the couch. And as Neal fell asleep he tried to memorize it. The dusting of hair on the back of Peter’s fingers, the length of his fingernails, the way he ran them through Neal’s hair and curled them to rest on his shoulder. “Go to sleep,” Peter ordered quietly. “I’ve got you.”

*

He dreamed impossible choices. Kate and Peter and the weakness that came with trust, dreamed poison and handcuffs and carrier pigeons plucking words from his mouth and flying away with them. _I ruined you, I failed you, I trust you._

Help me.


End file.
